I understand that the initial mage who crits gets counted as doing all the Ignite damage for damage/aggro purposes. Every ignite after the initial one gets added on to the roll and increases the length of the debuff.

First- Does critting reset the debuff's timer, or is it still just working off the initial one and adding on. That is, if the 2nd crit follows one second after the first, would it be 2 seconds or 3 seconds until the first ignite tick?

Second- What happens when the Ignite hits 5 debuffs and there's another crit. Does it keep rolling or is it just ignored?

Third- What is the debuff priority on ignites?

1) Yes, new crit resets the timer
2) No idea
3) Hard to say, but it seems more than minor debuffs like DW or fireball dot, and looks like more than warlock dots

The debuff priority on ignite is pretty low as of 1.11 since they implemented parts of their debuff priority system. Ignite is a uncontrolled dot/procced debuff which has a generally lower priority than controlled dots and passive debuffs (CoE,CoS,CoR, sunder, faerie fire etc).
Thus ignite gets bumped off alot more nowdays, which honestly is fucked up since ignite is one of the best dots out there and this is a special case since we´re the only class with a spread out critbonus like that.
This basically means that insane debuffs like fireball dot, serpent sting, shadow word pain and moonfire has a higher priority than ignite, working as intended?

I was under the impression that it rolls like:
Ignite A
Ignite A+B
Ignite A+B+C
Ignite A+B+C+D
Ignite A+B+C+D+E
Ignite B+C+D+E+F meaning that new ignites replace the old ignites OR higher ignites replaces lower ignites. As we all know, ignite is capped to 5 as of 1.11, and this theory takes that into account.

But this picture kinda burned that theory to the ground


Judging by that picture, ignite only counts the 5 first crits then ignites added after that will only keep rolling the same ignite, not add any damage.
It´d be easy to test but I always disable periodic creature damage since it spams the combatlog. Anyone that tried Loatheb can surely tell exactly how it works.

However, if it only counts the 5 first crits and nothing else, that means that if you crit 5 times with scorch and then for some reason starts fireballing and crit with those, you lose lots of ignite damage since the 5 scorch ignites were there first. If that's the case then I really hope they'll reconsider and make higher ignites replace lower ignites at least. That's also a way of rolling it.

As someone playing in a guild with 6 fire mages on Naxx raids, this is correct. Stronger crits DO NOT replace weaker crits, either. This means that the most effective way to start an ignite is to have all your mages simultaneously blow combustion and fireball, and when the stack reaches 5, Scorch to maintain it as long as possible.

When you're not using Combustion, though, Scorch is still the best way to roll ignites because fireball's long casting time makes it extremely unlikely you'll be able to roll an Ignite without getting very lucky.

This is more or less exactly what i was about to post. The combustion trick to get a good initial ignite stack, followed by scorch spam is a great way of getting a decent rolling ignite up. But without combustion its much harder to make the most out of rolling ignites. What would be incredibly useful is some sort of mod that constantly displays some information about the current ignite stack in and window on your screen. Info like:
- Number of ignites stacked
- Dmg of last ignite tick
- Owner of the ignite (for agro purposes)
- a small countdown to when the current ignite will tick off. This would need to be reset every time someone refreshes the ignite with another crit.

While scorch is the best way to keep a rolling ignite going, even with a x5 ignite stack up just from scorch, its still lower overall dps to just Fireball spam (if dividing the rolling ignite dps between say 5 mages). So the ideal situation is to use fireball (mana permitting) as much as possible until you have an ignite that is exceeding x per tick (x varies based on number of mages and various other factors, but is roughly around 1700 per tick) at which point if you switch to scorch to keep the ignite ticking over you will be doing the same, or more dps, as fireball spam but using a more mana efficient spell.

Keeping 3-4k Ignite ticks rolling just creates some insane dps with obscene mana efficiency.

So if anyone knows of such a mod, or is capable of making one, let me know ;D

While in general new crit resets the timer, there is an exception case.

Ignite is a 20% of crit damage every tick (2 secs) from the initial crit. If you follow a crit with another crit before the first tick of the initial ignite, you won't see a rolling ignite behavior. Given casting time and spell "travel" time, this basically means following up a crit with an instant cast crit, but if that happens the typical rolling ignite behavior of:

tick 1: Ignite A
tick 2: Ignite A+B
tick 3: Igniet A+B

Instead becomes:

tick 1: Ignite A+B
tick 2: Ignite A+B

I was under the impression each tick was half of the ignite dmg (or 30% of the crit value). So when you crit you don't cause any ignite dmg immediately, instead it waits 2 seconds then ticks once for half the ignite dmg followed by another tick 2 seconds later for the remainder of the dmg.

Your post suggests that ignite ticks once straight away for 1/3 of the ignite dmg (followed by 1/3 of the dmg 2 and 4 seconds later).

Uh that is correct, when you crit 40% of your total crit damage is spread out over a 4 second dot which ticks for 50% of the ignite damage every 2 seconds.

My apologies if I wasn't clear. Total ignite is 40% of the crit damage, but it's a DoT that ticks twice. Each tick is 2 secs. The exception case I was referring to is what happens when you essentially crit twice "instantly" i.e. within a second or so of each other. In such a case, ignites will stack for 2 tick duration, instead of 3.

Sidebar question (god I love the discussions here):
Would it be sensical to scorch spam up to 5x vul, let the ignites (intentionally) roll off from that, THEN hit combustion and trinket/fireball spam, swapping back to scorch?

Specificly, I'm remembering another discussion where people were getting %-based modifers being applied twice to ignite- once on the intial cast of fireball, followed up by an additional 20% to the scorch damage. 4% damage is nothing to sneeze at, but is it worth doing this?

For even sicker numbers, ponder Nightfall, waiting for a proc to transfer from scorch maintenence to Fireball....

Just my random thoughts....

Ok, so...

A few more quick questions...

My Scorch Crits (Ignite starts here at 0 seconds), followed up by another Scorch crit (about 1.6 seconds after the first one). Does the Ignite first tick at 3.6 seconds or 2 seconds?

How does Improved Scorch work with Ignite? If, for example, my Fireball crits then I put an Improved Scorch debuff on there in between Ignite ticks, does the 2nd ignite tick for more damage?

Also, when someone dies and their Ignite keeps rolling, does it become damageless aggro? What if they were combat rezzed or soulstoned?

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I'm mostly asking because I'm trying to figure out the way to optimize Ignite damage with 4 or more Fire mages in the raid.

How worth it is it to have one or two fire mages in your raid if the others are frost? Most of our mages have a strong preference for frost, and it seems to me that I may be better off speccing frost to benefit from winter's chill rather than trying to keep an ignite rolling by myself. Thoughts? (We are attempting gluth at the moment).

You dont need rolling ignites to beat frost mages, just keep the debuff up with a scorch every 4-7 fireballs and you'll be outdamaging frost mages.

I was the only fire mage in my guild for a while myself, keeping up with full pve spec frost mages with my 21/30 pvp-pve fire spec. I re-speced to 17/31/3 (pretty much full pve) and now was ahead, then another frost mage saw the light and spec fire, noticable rolling ignites increase, as well as both our dps.

Ignoring rolling ignites, a Fire Mage will do close to the DPS of Frostbolt spam and close to the DPM of Frostbolt Spam (with Scorch). The DPS increases dramatically if the Fire mage has the mana to work with Fireball and possibly Fireblast. The DPS for fire mages is also higher on trash mobs where they can start with Fireball without having to build up with Scorch.

DPS/+dmg for Scorch is approximately 0.385
DPS/+dmg for Frostbolt is approximately 0.380 (without Arcane Instability)

The ideal situation for Frostmages is one with Winter's Chill and the rest going 28/23.

Does anyone have a successful method of convincing long-time frost mages to switch to fire? I've tried to lure them with the DPS carrot and offering to go halfsies on respec but with little success. The only other fire mage is 0/30/21 elementalist, who doesn't see the usefulness of clearcast/arcane med/combustion. All I really want is a chance to make and use a coordinated combustion macro =)